For your convenience all the nominated pieces are in this thread.
Have fun reading them again and don't forget to vote for your favourite piece!

Thanks all nominees for making this possible and thank you members for nominating these fine works.
Good luck to all who have been nominated.

__________________

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

identity identity!
do you have it to speak for thee?
for I know who I am to be,
I know my name with clarity
I only speak with verity
and radiate sincerity!
from here and on
I am the one
that pride myself all merities
my brevity thou speakest for me!
identity identity!
have you others, something to add?
say now or else hold on to thee!

__________________

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

When I think of the things you said
And the way that you're in my head
I never felt like I was good enough
I know you don't like to hear those things
But wait for what the next part brings
The best part's coming up

Friends like you are a rarity
With a kindness like a charity
It feels so hard living up
But when I'm circling the drain
You always pull me up again
I promise I'm not giving up

I'll write my millionth verse
About how you get me through the worst
I have to get the words out somehow
I feel better now about myself
Since you pulled me out of my own hell
You make me feel so happy now

You're always reaching out to me
My silence lasts an eternity
But we can say that's just a quirk
You're the girl, goes out, has fun
And I am just the quiet one
I think that dynamic could work

__________________

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

a summer wine
once filled my cup
but in the honest midnight muse
I realized
that laughter shared in heady youth
will fade away like melting snow
and leave me lonely
full of sighs
and look aways
from walkers by

but now I'm steeped
and drunken sprawled
across the bed
that held the night
now filled with early morning light

adrift alone
in endless water
I made safe port
within your eyes
I turned my back on seas of grey
and sailed into an ocean new
with heaven's stars in pools of blue

you hardly seem of human race
your brow so smooth
and graceful eyes
from elven band
I think you've strayed
I thank my God that you have stayed
for however long you will abide
I'm grateful that you're by my side

your fragrance will not stay confined
it reaches out to touch my mind
and wrap me in some heaven mist

this morning it has filled the room
like honeysuckle
soaks the air
in deep of night
with sweetest scent

a fairy cordial
a taste divine
if you are willing to leave behind
the mortal world
to venture on
the otherside
where elvish maidens all reside

no angel prints upon the floor
they dare not tread so close to you
and risk the chance
to fall from grace
and lose their rapture of Divine
from just one look into the blue
the living wonder
I know as you

__________________

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

When I walk Elysian Fields
Will I remember you?
Will soft winds whisper yesterdays
and breathe of love anew?
Will my shadow still be seen,
in now far distant dreams,
and shall I hear you cry my name,
and know what sorrow means?
If promises were wishes,
and wishes promise true,
Then we will walk these fields of gold,
Together,
me and you.

__________________

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

Once when Cousin Jamal was studying abroad, in Malaysia, he was found naked in bed with his girlfriend during Ramadan. And Uncle Muneer had darkened with rage and had dispatched him straight to the mullah, twenty miles from Petaling Jaya. The mullah was full of righteous fury and made Jamal recount everything, down to the last droplet of expelled semen. He then checked Jamal’s luggage, confiscated his CDs and DVDs and gave the boy a translation of the Quran.

“The Quran is a mirror,” he said. “Read and you will see the filth on you”

He stood looking in the doorway and left. Jamal flung the book across the room and went through his suitcase. He found a DVD, Into the Blue, in the folds of a pair of faded blue jeans. He took it out and studied its cover. His eyes lingered on Jessica Alba’s form. As he was putting it back, the door was flung open and the incensed face of the mullah bore down on him.
He dragged Jamal by his ear to the sitting room and pushed him into a sofa. He thrust the disc in the player and made the boy skip scenes until the one where Jessica Alba dived into the water in her two-piece arrested him.

“Naked, sex-crazed Christians!” his voice sliced through the silence as though it was a kafir. “Subhanallah! They believe men came from animals so they behave like them. Where is their shame eh? Where is your shame? Allah has revealed woman’s awra as everything but her face, hands and feet,” he cried, stabbing them with a thin, hairy finger.
Jessica Alba’s breasts bobbed in agreement, increasing the mullah’s wrath.

“And yet you look at her. At others like her. You know what you’re doing? You are raping them with your eyes. Raping! Do you realise your eyes can be gouged out for that?” his face trembled. “And fornicating with that whore! In this holiest of months! You won’t even smell the musk of Jannah on the Day of Judgment. God forbid.”

He glared at the boy and was satisfied with the expression of sullen resignation on his face. He fell into an armchair as if spent from a Hajj and poured two glasses from a jug on the table, handing one over to Jamal who took it instinctively and drank.

“Your father is a good man,” the mullah’s voice was softer. “He is very concerned about you. Just doing well in school won’t get you out of Jahannam. I was once like you, you know. Young, misguided. Never a thought about death or the Last Day. And one day my mother died. No warnings. I was only fourteen. She still fetched me from school. They say her death made me lose my mind completely. Do you know what it is like, to lose your mind?”

Jamal jerked his head.

“It disappears so quietly you don’t even realise. You keep going as though nothing had happened. Then suddenly, you start to notice things. Little things. But they are so obvious you wonder why you hadn’t seen them before. Then they begin to come together and you see the bigger picture. And in time you see those big pictures themselves are part of an even bigger one. And so on.”

The mullah grew quiet and a look of painful concentration conquered his face.

“Only prophets can see the final picture,” he said finally, in a voice thick with regret.

Jamal shuddered.

“You begin to see into the hearts of people. You see their thoughts. You see their secrets. Their guilt! And you curse yourself for not seeing it earlier. Why, it’s all over their faces! Darkening them. Making them twitch. It is in the clothes they wear. The way they walk. How they eat. Then it strikes you. You read the Quran and it says good men’s faces are radiant with the Light of God. The wrongdoers have theirs twisted. Because everything we do, every thought we have affects us. And God made it so that our thoughts and deeds appear on our faces.” He stopped for a moment to drink.

“And suddenly everywhere I turned, I saw faces blackened with sin. Even those of my family. My friends. All black, misshapen faces. Eating. Talking. The words dribbling out of their rotting jaws. But the worst face of all…” he swallowed. “The worst of them was my own!”

He had seen it in the mirror; rotten, the flesh falling off. Smelled its stink. His mouth had been grinning an animal grin. Grinning in ignorance. They said he hadn’t stopped screaming for days.

“Are you listening to me, boy?”

Jamal nodded quickly.

“It’s true in a sense that I lost my mind. But was the mind I lost really my own? It seemed less believable the more I thought. For that was a mind cultivated by the kafir teachers at school. A mind molested by Hollywood and Jewish TV. By the people in my home, yes, even those in the mosques. That was the one I’d lost. But that wasn’t my mind. It was one society helped create for me. This ignorant society that does not implement Shari’a, that lets its women go out on the street, naked. That allows the homosexuals and fornicators to walk with the rest of us!”

A frozen hand clenched in Jamal’s stomach and began push up his gullet. He rushed to his room and slammed the door. Staggering into the toilet, he grabbed the edge of the bowl and heaved. And felt it slip out of his throat, searing his tongue.

There was a knock on the door and the mullah strode in, his white tunic unbuttoned above the waist. A thin hairy line ran up the middle, expiring just below his neck.

“Allah showed me what He had hidden from you hypocrites” he was a presence behind Jamal, who was still on his knees, retching. The sound reverberated inside the bowl like a chorus of the diseased.

“Once you’ve seen you can’t unsee! Don’t you understand? It was the Joy of Revelation that made me scream! Do you understand, you sinful creature? It was the Joy!” The mullah pounced on Jamal, pushing his head deeper into the toilet. The boy’s arms flung out as his face hit first china then filth. A dark shape formed in the field of his vision and began to move. He opened his eyes and caught a flash of blue and bronze as Jessica Alba was swept into the gloom of the drain.

__________________

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

Touch the trees
feel the warm air
collide with your half
closed eyelids

Be open to answer
the calls
of nature

Taste it's effortless ideal

Aware of your inferiority

Crack the floor
beneath your feet
release your petty
idle thoughts

Know in your soul
the forest of dreams
is where you belong
and will remain
forever more.

__________________

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.